Special Collectionsby Sally L. GrossSpecial Collections on the 6th floor of the Central Library is an area of non-circulating material on “special” subject areas that are collected in-depth. It operates as a mini-library within the larger context of the whole University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. Almost all the functions performed by other units in the Libraries are also performed within Special Collections.
Circulation and information services functions are performed at the service desk. This is the first point of contact for researchers coming in to Special Collections, and it is where researchers request material as well as receive help with their reference questions. Some researchers never physically come in to Special Collections, and their requests come through the Web, by e-mail or regular mail, and by telephone. Intellectual access to the collections is provided by Special Collections staff. This involves putting records for books, periodicals, maps, archival and manuscript collections, oral histories, graphics, sheet music, and newspapers into the Libraries’ online catalog, PULSe, either by downloading records from a national database or inputting the records directly. Staff also accession and process archival and manuscript collections and for each collection produce a finding aid, which is listing of what is actually in a collection. Special Collections has a listing of its Guide to Archival and Manuscript Collections on the Web; this guide lists all the collections that Special Collections has and divides them into the broad categories of Historical Manuscripts, Texas Labor Archives, University Archives, Photographs, and Texas Political History. Special Collections also has begun to put its finding aids on the Web. Both the guide and the finding aids allow researchers, who may not know what collections Special Collections contains, to find materials using Web search engines.
Special Collections is also involved in several exciting digitizing projects. Three years ago Special Collections, in conjunction with other departments on campus received a grant from the Houston Endowment, Inc., to mount a Web site called Cartographic Connections that can be used by middle and secondary school teachers to improve teaching through the use of historic maps in the classroom. The Cartographic Connections site includes scanned images from Special Collections map collection as well as lesson plans for the teachers. Currently Special Collections has a TexTreasures grant, administered by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, to provide a Web site called Tejano Voices with access to seventy-seven video oral history interviews with Texas Mexican American political leaders. The interviews will be cataloged into a national database, and the transcripts will be reside on the Web and include excerpts from each video. Other digitization projects are planned for the future as time and money allow. Some of these will focus on the photograph collections; two such projects are from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection and would include digitization and access to early Texas photographs and to the glass plate negatives. Special Collections has a collection development policy that describes the four areas that are collected: Texas; the Mexican American War of 1846-1848; Mexican political history from 1810-1920; and the history of cartography with an emphasis on the Gulf of Mexico and the Greater Southwest. Staff select books and maps for purchase, and an endowment is being developed to support the growth of the cartographic collection. Donations in the form of materials, especially in the manuscript and archives areas, play a major part in the development of Special Collections. Special Collections is especially interested in receiving donations, such as family letters and records of local clubs and organizations; just recently Special Collections received scrapbooks from the Arlington Garden Club, Arlington’s oldest club. Monetary donations are always welcome and are often in the form of memorial gifts to honor a friend or relative or an event such as a wedding or anniversary. Preservation is also a function that is important, and Special Collections currently has a grant from the Summerlee Foundation to allow for conservation work to be done on its map collection. It also has a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to rehouse the 1940s negatives in the W. D. Smith Inc. Collection (a commercial photography firm from Fort Worth), while at the same time developing a database to access the negatives. Special Collections is also currently reformatting the glass plate negatives from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection into reproducible negatives and prints.
Special Collections staff also has a number of other activities that support curricula at the University and the community at large. This includes instruction for UTA classes as well as one-on-one work with researchers. Special Collections works closely with the faculty and undergraduate and graduate students, especially in the History Department. Programs and exhibits and tours are also done by Special Collections staff. At least two exhibits a year are mounted in Special Collections; recent ones have featured Texas labor unions and the shape of Texas as depicted in maps over the years. Special Collections is also proud to host the Virginia Garrett Biennial Cartographic History Lectures, a daylong event in which scholars and collectors come to speak about a specific cartographic theme. In 2000 the theme was “Maps in Popular Culture” and in October 2002 the theme will be “The Third Coast: Mapping the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.” Additionally, Special Collections cosponsors conferences developed by the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography. Some of the subjects of the conferences have been Arlington history, railroad history, Texas annexation, the Mexican American War and the Spirit of Place. The Compass Rose is published semi-annually with articles that deal with events and collections within Special Collections and are usually written by Special Collections staff. Historian Dr. Gerald Saxon, UTA Libraries Associate Director, serves as editor. Special Collections serves both the UTA and the larger community in many ways. Yes, indeed, Special Collections is a mini-library within a larger setting. |
UTA Library Notes, vol 8 no 1 Spring 2002 |